There is much to love about the Portland Art Museum. Especially now with the latest $116 million renovation orchestrated by Portland-based architect firm Henneberry Eddy in collaboration with Vinci Hamp Architects and centered around the new Mark Rothko Pavilion, you will encounter a lot of beautiful, interesting, and spectacular examples of works of art from across centuries of creative human production. Despite an unusual collection of over 50,000 objects, one informed by the various tastes and gifts of the city’s privileged few over the years, the great news is that, despite changes both visible and invisible to today’s visitors, there are many incredible works of art currently on view. With the newly added space, galleries can now showcase recent acquisitions or works too challenging to exhibit that have not seen the light of day in many years. Personal highlights included the ethereal Robert Irwin wall sculpture, Untitled (1966–67), Magdalena Abakanowicz’s burlap Embryology – 100 (1978–81), and the rich colors of Paul Harris’ lithographs from his 1969 stint at the Tamarind Institute on full display in a new works-on-paper gallery. I wish I could name about 100 other things I discovered in their place, but instead, I’ll say simply: see for yourself.
Visitors to the old space may remember shuttling underground between the two buildings, the Mark and Hoffman wings, in a horrifying tunnel of fluorescent light and linoleum, but the new entrance makes the two buildings become two halves of a cohesive whole, like complementary hemispheres, instead of warring, asymmetrical factions. Despite an extensive local advertising campaign (“Everybody is an art person”) and record attendance for the first free weekend of its opening, this new addition is no Bilbao, and thankfully not. A native of Denver, I can still remember the many pains, both fiscal and physical, the new wing of the Denver Art Museum underwent when it first opened the leaky and art-resistant Hamilton building, a late-in-life afterthought of the star-chitect Libeskind. Bolder is not always better. While many of the architectural choices like dual avenue entrances in the PAM’s lobby and its new open column-less floor plans are practical and borrow directly from architectural features seen at other major museums in metropolitan areas (For example, MoMA’s twin entrances on 53rd and 54th), PAM’s new glass Rothko pavilion brings the layout of the new museum into parlance with a more typical experience, and elegantly so, with new sitelines between galleries and large windows that invite artworks to shift under the changing natural light conditions. The renovations likewise add much-needed basic amenities for visitors, like improved restrooms, a more streamlined ticketing experience, places to rest and reflect, and improved ADA accessibility. The new layout allows for more art to be displayed, too, over 100,000 new square feet in fact, an exciting prospect for the institution. Pipilotti Rist’s delightful immersive video installation, 4thFloor to Mildness (2025), is something I never thought I would see in Portland because it contains massive upholstered interactive elements and large digital displays installed on the ceiling. If gestures such as these are glimpses into the future, I look forward to what the museum’s curatorial staff will do with these newfound opportunities for play.
On the curatorial perspective at the PAM, the museum follows a traditional academic structure with curatorial departments led by PhD-minted scholars well-respected in their field, based on particular historical or medium-specific strengths in the collection. In other museums with comprehensive historic collections, this makes sense. The Egyptologist at the Met may create an exhibition on tomb design, or the nineteenth-century paintings expert at the Nelson-Atkins might stage a pointillism show. The Portland Art Museum is situated in a curatorially awkward position with robust holdings in very specific areas, while also having practically nothing in others. This is one of the hallmark aspects of being a regional museum—a unique challenge for the museum’s curators whose collective voices sometimes harmonize in its latest exhibitions to accompany the new space, and at other times, can be noisy or disparate in their attempt to reach audiences.
I was blown away by the touching homage to the late Wiyot artist Rick Bartow, a major figure in the Pacific Northwest. His ghostly, jewel-like portraits of animals and spirits haunt me still. The collection of contemporary Japanese ceramics on display is a must-see for any ceramic-curious maker, as the technique behind those pieces, in addition to the care with which they’ve been so thoughtfully lit and displayed, is rare. A surprising crowd favorite and the best on view currently is Together, a photography exhibition that brings together imagery about collectivity and resistance with works by names big and small, from Gary Winogrand and Bernice Abbott to several unidentified photographers. I caught a glimpse of a woman in her early 70s lingering over Marc Riboud’s famous 1967 photograph of the March on Washington, and our shared appreciation of that image made me realize its potential echoes through time and what it might say about resisting power today.
Some exhibitions were overly academicized, like the current installation in the Native American galleries: a case display of ephemera showcasing the history of exhibiting Indigenous art at the PAM. This read like a visual bibliography for a scholarly paper, complete with signage that appeared grafted straight from a PowerPoint; I couldn’t imagine most adults, let alone anyone under the age of 25, spending time viewing this information. Most disappointing was the lack of art in this display, thankfully softened by the incredible works of baskets and multiple generations of beaded plateau flat bags in the neighboring room. Another heavy-handed exhibition was To Gather Your Leaving: Themes of Diasporic Experiences in the Northwest, which greeted visitors with a literal shelf of books for them to read. The works in that exhibition stretched outside of the thematic lines to the point of being irrelevant, but there was much to love with ceramics by Akio Takamori, a page from Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, and Sharita Towne’s colorful and poignant For Us (2019–2020).
Other displays were delightfully oversimplified, perhaps to the point of talking down to the audience. One gallery in the European galleries featured just a bunch of paintings of Mt. Hood—what’s not to like! The gorgeous new mezzanine level is a curatorial collaboration between several departments focused on larger sculpture with some paintings as well, all lit by the misty Pacific Northwest light streaming from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Called Forming Nature, Nature Formed, the whimsicality of the title belies an uncomplicated theme: art that considers the natural world as its subject. I certainly wondered if some of the absolutely stunning works on view in that gallery—like the Kwakwaka’wakw artist Charlie James’ Dzunuk’wa Feast Dish (1900) or the lovely Ocean Park #91 (1976) by Richard Diebenkorn—might have more interesting things to say to each other than a simple focus on “nature.” For this installation, it seemed like the inclination to collaborate might have overshadowed a more rigorous attention to the objects on display, as beautiful and thoughtfully selected as they are. In a small room tucked far away in the back of the pre-Modern European galleries, I discovered an array of fantastic silver gelatin print photographs from early Modernist experimenters like Imogen Cunningham displayed next to an impressive fleet of Modern silver candlesticks and table ornaments in a teeny exhibition called Mirror Mirror. It was fun, it was weird, I didn’t learn much about silver, but I love that it exists. The prevalence of the Schnitzer collection speaks more to the fundraising efforts for the building (with a $13.5 million gift from the family for the capital campaign, the largest in the museum’s history) and less about the curatorial work being done, with back-to-back exhibitions in the main hall of the museum: Global Icons and David Hockney. Despite showcasing some beautiful individual prints by artists like Kara Walker and Hale Woodruff, the newest Black art and experiences galleries in the museum, awkwardly situated on the lower floors of the Mark Building, felt sterile and less thoughtful—a collection show whose basic theme seemed to revolve around an overly generic representation Black identity without a real consideration for how those artists might have other more nuanced or contrasting thematic concepts at play: the legacy of slavery in early twentieth-century as it affected economic opportunities for people of color, urban versus rural experiences of Black communities, or portraiture as a form of power for Black sitters, for example. I think it’s time to retire the suite of prints by Derrick Adams, which have seen a lot of airtime (like the recent exhibition Just Playin’ Around at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University). Lisa Jarrett’s nearby Tenderhead installation and the Mickalene Thomas video installation, Do I Look Like a Lady? (Comedians and Singers) 2016, provided shining counterpoints of specificity.
The Portland Art Museum has been part of the cultural landscape of this community for over 130 years, a staggering testament to the generations of Portlandians who wanted to see art in their city. Like the many modern museums whose beginnings can be credited to the late nineteenth-century aristocratic cabinets of curiosities opened up for the edification of common people, the Portland Art Museum, too, has been shaped and literally built by the city’s wealthiest and their tastes. Newer modalities of understanding a museum’s role in the wake of post-colonial schools of thought emphasize this problematic history as a potential site for reflection within the institutions themselves. The caveat, of course, is that this all occurs within the parameters set by those wealthy few who fund the endeavors. It’s the fundamental dichotomy of all museums today: institutions whose mission is to engage the communities they serve while also being financially beholden to the wealthiest, whose politics, values, and tastes can often be at odds with those whom the museums most hope to reach. All this is to say, all museums nowadays are inherently fraught and complicated spaces. The way the Portland Art Museum has raised funds is not exceptional in comparison to any other museum in this country, all of which are reliant on large donations, all of which would not exist without those donations.
The Portland Art Museum’s latest renovation firmly embodies this friction.
The fundraising effort and completion of this capital campaign is a major achievement that took, by all accounts, the entirety of Brian Ferriso’s twenty-year career at the PAM. But it’s time for the museum to renovate its identity too, not just its galleries. I’d love to see this next chapter of the museum be more culturally proactive, instead of reactive. What I find lacking, perhaps a symptom dovetailing with the news of Ferriso’s departure, is a singular vision for what the Portland Art Museum should be for the community and the region. Plans for the museum may include buzzy artist installations or blockbuster exhibitions, but I look forward to a future Portland Art Museum that embraces more fully the city’s teeming creative ecosystem, a tough balancing act to achieve when funding sources for arts organizations are rapidly disappearing. But a girl can dream.
It sounds obvious to point out that Portland is a city with a rich cultural life: from performing to visual arts, film to ceramics, there are artist-run galleries, medium-specific grassroots community art-making spaces (Mud Room, Franklin Foto, Drawing Studio), artist-led programming and performances (like Future Prairie currently at Deep Waters), and even art-forward community activism groups (North Pole Studio). Where is their presence at the Portland Art Museum? How is this collection in any way being used as a resource for our exceptionally creative and wacky city? In addition to lifetime free admission for Portland residents, I would love to see a revamp of programming centered around the PAM’s incredible collection, one that, instead of featuring the usual curator lectures or artist talk-backs, thinks creatively about what the community here really needs from its art museum. Where are the programs for kids? Where are the chances for Portland’s artists to connect with the work on view? The Portland Art Museum may need to shed its more traditional ideas about museum work in order to achieve a reconnection to its community, but to me, that is more than a fair trade for creating a space that could truly inhabit the weird, the silly, the kooky spirit of our city, and most importantly, invite more people in.